Imagine you (he) won the lottery. Imagine you (he) decided to make all your (his) life decisions for a year and a day based on advertisements, and imagine also, that you (he) had decided not to believe what people (they) told you (him). That’s how you (he) ended up in China, unable to make your (his) next move.Quirky and enjoyable and if you rad the story this will mean something but not unless.

Lily Daw and the Three Ladies

From The Collected Stories of Eudora Whelty, (1983), Penguin Books

Lily is an orphan, and not that bright. The Ladies of the town have taken it upon themselves to look out for her future well being. Should she take a job in service in Ellisville, or should she marry the xylophone player from the travelling band, whom they assume is only after one thing and is long gone.

Fruits de Mare

From The Minerva Book of Short Stories I, edited by Giles Gordon and David Hughes (1988). Fruits de Mare was originally published in the London Magazine in 1986. Ronald Frame writes novels, plays and short stories and is from Glasgow.

Set in a restaurant where the only things that define it are an aged mirror on the wall and the fact that it serves seafood almost exclusively, we are not even told whether the restaurant is close to the coast. The fish on the menu is a device and forms part of the backdrop to a series of vignettes about the various diners, all couples, but all in different combinations: a pair of lovers, a business man and his afternoon’s plaything, a divorced couple, a grandmother and grandson, a step mother and stepson. The story is about getting below the conversations of others and working out their stories. This is done through the eyes of the narrator, the only diner who is eating alone.

The Flints of Memory Lane

Taken from the collection Fragile Things: Short Fictions & Wonders (2006)

Gaiman describes his ghost story as an ‘unsatisfactory’ thing. I’m sure he knows it is not. It’s precisely the fact that it’s not constructed and is seemingly such a small thing that makes it truly creepy. I was certainly spooked.